good evening. i'm eliot spitzer. thanks for joining us "in the arena." as president obama personally thanked the special ops team that killed bin laden, we learn that osama bin laden was drawing up new plans to attack america. he was drawing up an attack on the rail system. but first, here are the stories we're digging in tonight. what a difference a week makes. bin laden called and killed. jobs are up, the gas of price is down and donald trump is off the front page. the president isn't just rung for re-election, he's -- then

time to hit the reset button. break with pakistan. and who's the enemy, now that the enemy is dead. lots of questions. >> we're effectively invading pakistan. >> joining us now is pentagon correspondent barbara starr, what can you tell us about this attack? >> good evening, elliot. we learned in the last 48 hours, the u.s. military launched a drone attack in southern yemen. this is a place where they believed anwar al awlaki was hiding. they did not get him.

they have no reason to believe they got him in this attack. but two other al qaeda operatives were killed, we are told. all part of a stepped up campaign to go after al qaeda leaders around the world. this american-born cleric, it's believed he inspired the times square attack and may have been behind the failed underwear bomber attack christmas day in the united states. ellio? >> is it fair to say he's been part of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula and they've been plotting nor attacks over the last year or two years? >> he's pretty much seen to be the operational leader of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula. twice now, they have

demonstrated the actual ability to reach out and touch the united states, if you will. in the airline attack and even though the times square plot failed, said to be the inspiration behind it. and that puts their power right on u.s. soil. elliot? >> that's exactly right. and they're operating in a failed state, which makes it easier for us to open rate there, but fewer constraints on them. now let's go back to the president. he discussed the osama bin laden attack while addressing a unit recently home from afghanistan. >> most of all, we're making progress in our major goal, our central goal in pakistan and afghanistan. that's disrupting and dismantling and we're going to ultimately defeat al qaeda. we have cut off their head, we will ultimately defeat them. >> reporte

>> now al qaeda isn't throwing in the towel. the organization declared, bin laden's blood will be a curse that will chase the americans and their agents, a curse that will pursue them inside and outside their koun dri. kosc country. fortunately with a huge cache of intelligence from bin laden's camp, they lost their stra teej you can and operational leader. this story is moving fast. let's go to abbottabad. what do we know about what they're rounding up even what, if anything, they're getting from these folks? >> anyone who had anything to do with the cam pound or anyone who sold them milk, anyone who sold them meat, anyone who came anywhere close to that front door of the compound and conversations with people on the

inside, people living close to the compound were arrested, but also in other parts of the city. what officials are saying is if the relationships were simply selling meat or milk and there was nothing nefarious about it, they will be released. but the authorities here want to find out if there's anyone else who had sympathies with al qaeda, who was supporting bin laden and supporting him and knew the whereabouts, anyone who might be helping al qaeda members or plotting attacks. the government here if you like, closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, if you will. but at the same time, trying to take what steps they now can to follow up on this action by tis s.e.a.l.s here. >> it sounds like they're arresting everybody in abbo abbottabad to make themselves

look like they're progressive. what's the reaction? is there sympathy for bin laden or most people are saying thank goodness he's gone? >> i get the impression most people say thank goodness he's gone. a lot of people i exprespeak to express that opinion. people are coming out and demonstrating. they were minority, they were motivated by the islamist political party, but they were small in numbers. 600. their protest was pretty muted. they sort of applauded on cue, chanted on cue. down with america, out with america. down with the government. and then they left and went away with nothing further. so i think they're the minority. the majority here seem to be happy bin laden is gone, elliot. >> going to be interesting to see what thereal popular response over there is once you

cut through all the political rhetoric that was almost inevitable. thanks so much. >> we have two of the very best people to break it down for us in washington. phil mudd deputy director of counterterrorism. both of you, thank you for being here tonight. the first question is, we now seem to be finding out. phil, you've been in the trenches with this. it seems bin laden himself was, in fact, an operational commander. he was not a distant chairman of the board. he was making day to day decisions. does that surprise you? >> it does not. i think we have to think about a couple of things here. first, we don't have a lot of information on the threat blotting that he was allegedly involved in. there's a fundamental difference between people coming to bin laden saying look, here's some ideas about how we go after the united states. ideas that look like what happened in madrid a few years ago, what happened in london in 2005. do you think these ideas are okay? should we proceed? and saying we have four

operatives, they might succeed 90 days from now. do you want to give the go ahead? we have a lot to learn about this intelligence. this might simply be subordinates saying, do you think this is the kind of strategic plotting we should be involved with? >> so the bottom line is we don't yet know immediately how involved he was. paul, let me ask you this. i don't care if it's a fortune 500 company or a small business, succession planning. was there succession planning within bin laden's organization, al qaeda? are they ready to replace him as a leader? >> they thought about this. they call it the internal constitution of al qaeda. zawahiri will now take over. it will be rubber stamped. i think we might expect a written statement and maybe a videotape in the next month or so announcing that zawahiri is the next leader of al qaeda. >> phil, you weigh in on this. is he going to carry the same weight, the same motional power that bin laden did. i'm told, you shall confirm this

or not, when people became members of al qaeda, they actually swore allegiance to bin laden, maybe the organization as well, but bin laden personally. will he carry that same weight and have the same capacity to run the organization? what dupg? >> absolutely not. no how, no way. he's got two problems. one internal, one external. internally, coming from the time when he was the head of an egyptian islamic group back in the '90s. because of the work force in al qaeda, the kind of prestigious, he's not going to let that get done. they're misread in this country. this is a revolutionary organization that depends on spreading the revolution through messages. bin laden was a messenger who had prestigious around the world. this is a big loss for the organization.

>> i'm trying to understand the distinction. they did plan and plot terrorist acts, did they not? >> absolutely. but a terrorist act is not an end to itself. it's a means to convince people in the persian gulf, knot africa, you're, the united states that the revolution can be won, that the americans are not invulnerable. when you lose your messenger for the revolution, financeers across the world say who do we support? who do we join? who do we pay and give our money to? and increasingly, that's not al qaeda. >> paul, you're nodding your head in agreement. that's a fundamental point, lay readers of the newspapers think of them as terrorists and full stop. explain this from your perspective. >> people who never joined the al qaeda organization are trying to launch attacks in their name. we've seen home grown

radicalization. without bin laden there anymore, they won't be as inspired, elliot. >> others, for instance, yemen and others will plot where have al qaeda has been the primary force. >> we're celebrating much too early. i was disit.ed to see the reaction this week. we just finished a chapter in the book. we did not finish the book. >> we didn't finish a group. what we ought to say is job well done. chin up. face forward, move on. this is not a time for

celebration. this isn't just a loss of a group. >> if what i hear you saying is correct, it puts a premium on using the information we got. to see how far out this radiates. the premium will be on time. is that right? >> western intelligence believes he was in close proximity in recent years. they're not going to be able to unravel the whole al qaeda. >> one of the things that's most

amazing to me is we set up a safe house, you know, proximate to the compound over the past months. how do you go about doing that? we thought it would be hard for bin laden to disappear into abbottobad and go unnoticed. you don't just rent hotel rooms and say here we are. tell us about how you days peer into the woodwork there and begin to set up such an operation. >> you don't disappear. you have to find people who mix in with the locals. you're not going to have some kid from houston saying i want to rent a hotel. you have to have someone whoing loos like he's local, acts like he's local. then you have to move on and ask a couple of questions. the first is, can we verify the target. do we have some certainty that the guy behind those walls is who we think he is.

small things, are there wires around a rotor can hit. big things like what does the environment look like? there's a lot of work to be done beyond identifying bin laden, but i wouldn't do that with a fellow from houston. you're going to do that with locals. >> showing up with a new york giants t-shirt isn't going to help 37 but what that suggests to me then is you need a lot of local assets as you guys refer to them. people you trust enough to extend into abbottobad to begin to gather situation. so you need to have pre-existing infrastructure within that region to get this going. is that a fair assumption? >> that's a fair assumption. weave been at it for nine years. we've been looking at the infrastructure of al qaeda in h success.areas. we've had a lot of experience doing this.

>> paul, last year from you. if, in fact, the loss of bin laden is such a blow to them and al qaeda as an, o, how do they then re-establish themselves as a major force. can we predict they're going to try to do something aggressive in the near term? >> it seems bin laden was obsessing about the 10th anniversary, handwriting plans, plots against the united states on the 10th anniversary. they're going to try to plot and restore that. al qaeda has been reduced to virtual irrelevance in much of the arab world. their best messenger is no longer there. >> ideologically, they have lost touch, we hope with the next generation of both the arab youth and certainly those in north africa. hopefully those in pakistan as well. thanks so much for being with us. coming up, our relationship with pakistan is at a cross roads as some in congress argued to break ties. there's no one that understands the consequences of that better

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chance for a new direction in the region is fareed zakaria. this week will not soon be forgotten. sort of change the techtonic plates in the regions. what are the options we've got in pakistan to accomplish them? >> it's a great way to think about this, elliott. we forget, we get so emeshed in these places. al qaeda found a way into afghanistan, and then from afghanistan into pakistan created bases, created a command and control center. this is our principal interest, deny them an opportunity to have a command and control center. i would say we have a secondary interest, which is largely in pakistan and not in afghanistan. afghanistan is a messed up country. it's messed up, dysfunctional, it's not that relevant. pakistan is six times the size in op pags of afghanistan. it has 100 nuclear weapons.

it is half the size of the entire err rab world, and it has probably the most virulent streeps of jihad diism as any country in the world right now. so we have more interest in pakistan than we have in afghanistan by far. >> it seems to me we have done better eliminating the command and control structure of al qaeda without forging a relationship with pakistan than we have through forging a relationship with them. so in order to accomplish the objective of decapitating al qaeda and hopefully making it irrelevant, do we need a close relationship with a pakistani government? >> unfortunately, yes. i would contest that premise. you know, we go into their country, we're effectively invading pakistan with the complicity of the pakistani government. it's not as though they don't notice. they know we're doing it. they allow us to do it. this way they have plausible deniabilit deniability, i don't mean in

this particular operation, but in general, they're allowing us go in and kill these bad guys. >> they know we're going to do it. we don't tell them. >> what would be a powerful step forward is if we could get the pakistani military as an unwaivering ally to go after those groups in northern waziristan, but so far they haven't been able to do it. >> you have the elected leadership, the military, three discrete nodes of power in afghanistan. but you also say in terms of how we structure the relationship, i'm left with the conclusion there was some level of state support fur al qaeda. why is there this duality. yes, they have the relationship with us, but there's some hesitancy. >> they say you americans, you've come in now, you're being nice to us, but you're going to go away. you always go away and forget

about us. and we're stuck in a neighborhood where the 800-pound gorilla is india, we can't win a conventional war with india. there's no way. the indian army is much too powerful. our only means of keeping inld yeah on edge is to use these militant groups as proxies to go into kashmir. we keep afghanistan on edge the same way. that's their world view. they say ewe'll shut down the bd guys who kill afghannys. . >> so sounds at every turn is a nuanced balancing game where nebraska is aligned with anybody unconditional unconditionally. it's always, we only go a little bit this way and then pull back. >> exactly. it's not actually in pakistan's interest to think like this. i think it's foolish. they want to have strategic depth in afghanistan. what does this mean in the 21st

century. what pakistan needs is to raise the standards of the living of its people to build more schools, build more infrastructure, to hook itself to the indian growth machine that is growing at 8% a year. but unfortunately, that's not the way the pakistani military think. they're stuck in a kind of 19th century real politic world view where they'll trying to keep india on edge, keep afghanistan down. it doesn't get them anything. but they do it. >> it sounds like beneath the public hysteria, there is, in fact, a similarity of interests here that binds us to the pakistani government. >> if the pakistani government could see its interests properly -- i tell you what, the democratically elected government in afghanistan and the united states do have very similar interests. they both want a military that's accountable and less engaged. now, the probe is the elected government of pakistan doesn't actually run the country. if we could find a way to get

pakistani democracy more strengthened and the military to play its frorp and constitutional role, that would be a frame work which would be a win-win for pakistan and the united states. >> i want to talk about the nukes. they have 100 nukes. it's grown 40%. they're the fifth largest nuclear power in the world. clearly something to be reckoned with. who controls those nukes? and is there a genuine risk given our ability just to fly our choppers in there and do what we do, snb else could go in there, seize them, get control of them, do something that would be threatening to us? >> i think it's a very low probability. the pakistani military is a pretty hierarchical organized military. it's a british in origin of training. every coup that's taken place in pakistan has never been a colonels coup. it's been the pakistani military with its entire command chain intact moving to replace the seivian government and moving back out. so i tend to think it's pretty controlled. they have, you know, locks even keys on it with one caveat.

the last year you have seen these assassinations of government figures, the government of punjab, the minister, they do appear to be el thes elements -- >> let's switch back to squall. -- al qaeda. they're there in some form, either the intelligence or the milita military. are there rogue operations or are they sanctioned from high up? >> my guess is that nobody at the top knew that osama bin laden was where he was. but that within elements of the isi and the military, there are friendly colonels or captains who knew that there was -- some al qaeda guy was there. maybe it was osama who provided some logistical prorts. and the higher ups have a policy of don't ask-don't tell. they don't want to know what's going on with the militant operation, what's going on with the connections with the other

militant group that the isi has contact with. it's a game. you know, they main plausibility denyability at the top, but there's out there helping these guys. >> if the president of the united states call youd and said fareed look, there are republican voices and some kra democratic voices saying cut all aid to pakistan. they're lousy partners, what would your response be? what what would you say we should condition our aid on doing. >> we tried it in the 1990s. we cut aid to pakistan. military got isolated. they went more radical. they went into the arms of the chieng nies to a certain extent and we lost all control, all influence. so i would say the aid is one thing that gives us some influence. keep the civilian aid for god's sake. that's building pakistani civil society and democracy. on the military side, we should be much tougher. we have to realize they need us more than we need them. we can walk away.

we can say to the indians, go and do what you want. that's not something the pakistanis want to hear. >> so we can ask them to eliminate the safe havens, for instance? >> are they willing to go into north waziristan? so far they have only gone after the bad guys who kill pakistanis. they need to start going after the bad guys who kill americans, otherwise it means they're maintaining this strategy of saying there are some good terrorists and there are some bad terrorists. and the good terrorists, whether intentionally or not, are the ones that kill americans. >> as always, fascinating stuff. thank you. >> pleasure. coming up, was killing bin laden murder? i talk with two sometimes controversial scholars about the true meaning of the raid that took out the world's top terrorist. don't go away. ing... do you even have a name? well, it doesn't matter. because it's about to change. there's a cheaper, cleaner way to fuel up now. the volt plugs into any socket, and fuels up at home.

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our next next guest says the united states never had any intention of taking osama bin laden alive. steven carter wrote a piece in the upcoming issue of "newsweek," urging americans to face up to the ugly truth on the raid on bin laden. or as he put it, the assassinati assassination. these are respected scholars with sometimes surprising and

controversial reviews. was the mission against bin laden a legitimate act of war, murder or assassination? and regardless of what you call it, was it morally justified? >> you know, without being there, it's hard to say. i spent a lot of time in combat as a war correspondent for 20 years. and you have to make split-second decisions. so without being in the room, i think we have to throw out that calf yat. however, by their own admission, he was unrm aed, he was shot in front of his kwief and daughter, and these are very, very highly trained units. and one suspects the order was probably shoot to kill. >> and and your presumption then, i've read speeches you've given since early in the week is that your belief is that there was really no intent to do anything other than kill him. >> well, without being on the enside, that's certainly the way it appears. and for those of us who cared about the rule of law, i watched the hague, i watched the

importance of the hague when it brought in figures like slobodan milosevic and others. >> by the hague, you mean the international criminal court? >> yeah. and i think we who believe the rule of law should be the foundation of a society, if there was any way we could have taken bin laden to the hague, it would have been a far better outcome than killi ining him. >> all right, steven, you have written about the law of war. do you agree that it would have been both preferable to do that, to use the international criminal court as the means of prosecuting him? or do you think it was morally appropriate -- the premise is the seals wept in there with a shoot to kill order. how do you assess this? >> well, nirs of a first of all agree with chris without being in the room, it's hard to give advice. but i would say this, president obama in his ohno bell prize address in 2009 said that a great nation's actions should be

judged by the just war tradition. and in the just war tradition there. >> es a difference between someone dying in battle and setting out to kill a person person. it can be justified to do it, but it's a different kind of act. we have to face up to that. back in world war ii, winston churchill and frank len rooseveroo roosevelt sat down and made a list of nazi leaders they would issue shoot on sight orders. the only reason they didn't issue the lis, it's when stalin saw the list, he wanted to make it 5,000 to 10,000 names instead. we have a long tradition of going after leaders on the other side. we have to be adults and face up to it, whether it's the kind of thing we want to do. >> i read your book, it's brilliant. you say we have to face up to it

and be honest about it. does ma mean it's morally appropriate? >> if you could find a way to limit in to strict necessity where you're going to save large numbers of civilian lives, i do think you can make a case for it. what we have to worry about is not the killing of osama bin laden, which most of us are actually relieved. it's rather that we aare ceding the president, the authority of who to decide to be killed. and that's not just the authority of obama who we may like. it's his successor, his succe success successor, his successor. as long as there's a war on terror, there's presidents who will be deciding unilaterally on who to kill. that's something we should talk about and think about very hard. >> you have taken as a premise that bin laden was not

operationally involved in al qaeda that he had somehow become a father figure to them and an ideological spokesman perhaps but not day to day involved. has anything that's emerged changed your perspective on that. has it changed your assessment of whether to take him out was appropriate. . >> he was unarmed. that's an act of murder. having spent time in combat, in war fair, there's always murder. i think to the point that steven made is a valid one. in terms of when i covered al qaeda, he contributed ideas about events and he was instrumental in terms of the fu funding. but he did not run the day to day operations. i spent a year rebuilding every step that operatives took. richard reid, the paris embassy bombing plot. and i don't see any evidence that that has changed. however, we may find that within the intelligence or, you know, the intelligence community,

assessing what they found, we have a different portrait. but certainly the intelligence officials that i was interviewing when i was with "the new york times," that was their belief. >> there are few people that know about it than you. do you think by killing them, we will evoke a stronger, more vicious type retaliation than if he had been taken alive? >> i think the fundamental problem is occupation within the middle east. remember, after the first gulf war, osama bin laden offered to come back to saudi arabia and help organize the defenses. he was turned down by the kingdom. we saw not only heavy occupation within kuwait, occupation of iraq, afghanistan, doha. and this is far more important. this is what's triggering that collective humiliation. that's fielding recruits from yemen and other countries into iraq and afghanistan. i think that's a far more serious threat than al qaeda, which has been largely broken and disrupted. >> we'll come back to that in a second. i apologize.

i cut you off before. >> one small point. i want to correct one thing that chris said. under the law of war, it is not murder to kill someone who is unarmed. as long as someone is a member oof a belligerent force and is not active tifly trying to surrender at that moment, you have a right to kill them. in the laws of war. >> don't go away. ♪ [ male announcer ] when you come to new york

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i'm back with chris henls, former middle east bureau chief and pulitzer prize winner and stephen carter, yale law professor. stephen, let me come back to you. i want to put up on the screen, a quotation from your marvelous book "the violence of peace." and it reads, the true absolutist will say and mean it, never resort to torture. this position is in its way nobel, but it fails to partake of the reality that we have no choice but to rank evils. moral relativism is something you're acknowledging here. you said the assassination, murder, defeat of bin laden is perhaps president obama's finest hour. are you saying when you put these thoughts together that the torture, if you believe it was required, that it was required to find him, was morally justified? >> first of all, i want to make clear, i'm not associating myself with the word murder

where osama bin laden is concerned. it's assassination. as to torture, i don't know and i don't think any of us how much of the information we used to track down bin laden came from either our use of these harsh techniques or perhaps the use of pakistanis use and small clues they may have passed along. none of us know that. my point is that, again, we as grown-ups have to recognize, accept the possibility that maybe an outcome many of us think is a good one, the killing of bin laden might be somehow associated at some point in its history with an outcome -- with a method, i should say, that many of us don't like at all. instead of turning hand springs -- >> stich, i want to do what i'm sure you've done to your yil students at law school. throw a hypothetical. train and presume without the enhanced interrogation -- i'm not going to call it torture --

we would not have gotten this evidence. would you say yes, use that enhanced interrogation? >> i as president would have said no, don't. but i perfectly well understand how someone could make a different choice. i think we're at a point where if you're going to get good information, people are going to try hard and use these methods to get it. i would rather we didn't try it. if that meant bin laden had gotten away, i suppose he would still be running free. but i don't think we should flee from the possibility that the information was related, and i think we should just accept that and accept that maybe those programs, horrific as they were, may have helped lead to this outcome. >> being a good intelligence officer is not that different from being 5 good investigative reporter. when you have to resort torture, you intelligence system has broken down. probably the most tortured detainee who was water boarded 180 times? >> 180. >> did not divulge the name of this courier. >> he lied about him.

before and after. >> there you go. when you have to resort to torture, what happened in 9/11 was we had no human assets inside of al qaeda. at least according to french intelligence, who i was working very closely with. and all of the major terrorist attacks that the french stymied, stymied through infiltrating these groups. and the idea that torture is number one effective, because you reach a point where even if they say something is true, you keep going, and they'll say anything to stop the pain. >> time winds down. i want to give you the last shot. you've been enormously skeptical of what our strategy has been thus far towards al qaeda. in 30 seconds, give us the strategy you would have us pursue. >> we should have built on the empathy that we had garnered throughout the muslim world after 9 swlsh 11. terrorism is a tactic, it's been with us for generations. you can't make car against a tactic. you have to isolate terrorists within their own society. and as soon as the bush administration started dropping iron fragmentation bombs all over the middle east, they became the best recruiting tool

these terrorist groups have had. >> are we doing any better now that we're trying to reach out to opposition forces? whether in libya or egypt? is that laying a foundation for a newly formed relationship? >> libya is a bigger issue. the proxy wars in yemen and pakistan, that is the problem. until we address that problem, terrorism is not going to go away. >> we're going to have to continue this some other day. thank you so much. fascinating conversation with two of the very smartest people in the world on this issue. coming up, it was a very, very good week. perhaps the best week ever for president obama. is it all downhill from here? not quite. when we come back. building up our wireless network all across america. we're adding new cell sites... increasing network capacity, and investing billions of dollars to improve your wireless network experience. from a single phone call to the most advanced data download, we're covering more people

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and find an arthritis treatment for you. visit celebrex.com and ask your doctor about celebrex. for a body in motion. what a week. last friday, the president's poll numbers were terrible and we were still talking about that birth certificate. but by monday, americans were posting pictures like this one all over the internet. and just so you can see it, it says sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate. i was too busy killing osama bin laden. can't say a whole lot more than that. today he's soaring in the polls, hero to the troops. suddenly 2012 looks like a cake walk. or does it? joining me now, first of all, which is more important, osama bin laden or job numbers. which would you rather carry as a sort of banner in the

campaign? >> it would have to be job numbers. we have some perfect -- near perfect historical parallels for this. 20 years ago at this time, george bush sr. was a shoo-in for relek. th -- relek. re-election. and guess what? >> he was running against the seven dwarfs. that's what the democrats were called. will, if that's correct then -- >> it's not. >> how do you interpret today's job numbers? stick with this. 244,000 additional jobs. pretty good number. but the unemployment rate jumps to 9%. how do you see this politically. >> a year and a half away from an election, they're virtually worthless. the extent to which they have merit, is the economy trending towards a position in which obama will be from a position of

strength in the election. and count me as pessimistic. the economy is treading water and propped up solely because of qe2. >> you acknowledge it was a good job creating mechanism. >> i argue it's propping up the economy. >> i thought you opposed it a couple of weeks ago. steve, do you buy this, the 244,000 don't really matter yet. >> well, it doesn't matter in terms of 2012. if this is the start of a trend, it absolutely matters. the line everybody established for obama, if he's under 8% for unemployment, he wins. if he's over 8%, he loses. every analysis says this is going to be right around 8%. which means it's probably going to be a really close election, decided at the margins. >> the suggestion is, is this part of a bigger trend? that's important thing. i don't know that we can say yes. >> it was better than we expected. i think we have to say that today. when you look at the growth

figures that came out. >> right. as factual matter, 244 was the net. 268 was the private sector and a loss in the public sector. in the long run, that may be a good thing. the reason we got 9% move up in unemployment is people are coming sbook the j-- back into job market. in the sense there's more people looking. do you agree with that? >> i think we're looking at little ripples in a pond that's much bigger than this. what mr. it be like when obama seeking re-election? a year and the answer to that, by the way, is qe3. it will be coming. >> there's another thing that happened this week, there was actually a republican debate down there in south carolina. >> i didn't know that. >> if you watch this thing, i think you saw another reason why obama might be optimistic. if the unemployment rate is around 8% and this is a toss-up

election, if these are the kinds of candidates the republican party is dealing with right now or candidates that are going to have to run with these guys. if this is what the republicans see, that's an advantage for obama. >> do you want to respond to that and defend your lineup at this point? >> no, i don't. let me say this. those job number dshs. >> that doesn't bode well, i spoepz. >> nobody has an answer to this, by the way. that's my original point to steve is osama bin laden is much bigger news. obama has that feather in his hat. it takes the win out of the sails of every single republican who says he's weak on foreign policy. real really? i got osama bin laden. >> we'll be right back. ♪ ♪ when you're resonsible for this much of the team,

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back now with will cain and steve kornacki. what happened, the republicans tried to sell their medicare proposal and it didn't sell so they pulled the plug? >> how did they pull it? >> they're not supporting it anymore. >> i don't know that it was ever suggested to be tied to a debt ceiling raise. or for that matter a 2011 budget. it was never a suggestion that they could do this from a minority position from the government. >> i think that's news to a lot of house republicans who thought this was something that they were going to really use as a

bargaining chip. >> the logic is this, they need to satisfy this sort of rabid tea party base. they need to show they're serious. they took the vote to really make it look like the democrats in the white house blocking this. then they can take it off the table and have a year and a half to make the government forget about it. >> that suggests they'll try to make this the fulcrum of the 2010 election? >> no, they'll pretend it didn't happen. but if they win, it will come back. >> can they el is it to the public? >> i don't know the answer to that. the history suggests no. history shows the american public wants every entitlement and low taxes. paul ryan tolnot only the general american public, but his own voter, you can't have everything. . >> we've got to stop there. >> he got kicked and he didn't do it.